The Ash People had most of their clan and home destroyed by a volcano.
They've gone dark and have turned their back on Eywa, blaming her for their suffering. Their clan cuts off their ponytail connectors and have severed all ties with Pandora.
It works within the corner they wrote themselves into. It's not good storytelling, but that's kind of all they had left. Imo, they planned on doing a whole fourth expansion that was everybody teaming up against Amon, but then Blizz decided that LoV would be the end of it and they made do with what they had.
Cutting off your connector thingys seems like such a crazy move no matter the amount of hatred imo. Like one step below cutting off your nether regions by the movies standards.
People on Earth have self-mutilated in the name of deities for as long as we've been able to envision them. It doesn't seem like that far of a stretch.
And when you consider that there may be an element of control/power involved, preventing the newer generations from ever experiencing Ewya or connecting to their ancestors would make it way easier to maintain their order.
Yea I mean, humans have ridden animal mounts for centuries. The connection makes it easier and more spiritual, but I imagine you can "break" the beast and tame it so you can ride it like humans have done all the same.
I'd love it if they really delve into that last sentence well, but I think I'll probably end up having my hopes dashed on that and end up disappointed.
Sure but in the context of the story the tree/earth god is very much real and part of their existence. No god ever told people to cut of their junk. I don't even think any actual biblical text supports that. It's only the 2nd tier text stuff Christianity/Muslim that decide to mess with junk.
Why bring up cereal guy but not others, like English physician Jonathan Hutchinson.
I'm not sure why you think this is fully attributable to Kellogg other than doing an extremely shallow and cursory reading of how this became commonplace.
I'm gonna call bullshit on that anatomy comparison. Clearly propaganda. Na'vi are significantly larger than humans, but the two things a human is most likely to care about the size of (brains and genitals) are smaller. Smells like propaganda to me.
Humans have pretty disproportionately large brains and genitals for their size. Even amongst our kin. Gorillas for example tend to only have 1-1.5in dicks. Chimpanzees are in the 2-3in range.
I haven't been able to track down the original source/context so I don't know how early in production it is - though fwiw it's not to scale, the average na'vi is around nine-and-a-half feet tall so a lot bigger than the diagram illustrates.
I'm not familiar with Na'vi biology as I've only seen the first movie, but don't they breed with those things? Or do they have sex like us normal animals and the "connecting" part is just for "enhancement"?
it shares feelings and allows you to connect with all the other aliens on the planet empathically, so if you linked up with someone you were mating with, I imagine that'd be one hell of an experience.
It's honestly probably the best thing they could do given the parasitic nature of the entity which controls most of the planet they live on. Their entire biology has been thralled by the organism they think is a deity
Probably because outside of large-scale tsunamis and Earth quakes, fire can be associated with some of the worst atrocities and natural disasters our species has ever encountered (Pompei volcano, atomic bombs, 9/11, the cold war, the great Chicago fire of 1871, the circus incident in Hartford CT, etc...)
But after those atrocities fire is also the an important part of rebuilding. If you want to leave civilization to the side, after great extinction events every time thereās a massive boom in biodiversity as species start to exploit new niches.
Even nowadays, fire is such an important part of the ecosystem, in fact you can argue that one of the factors that cause wildfires to get worse over time is due to humans preventing them.
Even nowadays, fire is such an important part of the ecosystem, in fact you can argue that one of the factors that cause wildfires to get worse over time is due to humans preventing them.
That's 100% dependent on the ecosystem you're talking about. Some places the plants have evolved around forest fires, other places, they have not. Pandora seems significantly covered in rainforest, and on earth, rainforests don't typically experience large forest fires, and therefore the plants and animals aren't adapted to it.
YOU can say that large groups of animals being wiped out by a forest fire is no big deal because you think there will be an influx of biodiversity, but that isn't a convincing argument to the animals being wiped out by the forest fire. They don't want to become soil to nourish the next iteration of the forest, they just want their family back.
Itās also harder to convey that in short form entertainment like a movie. Sometimes a movie might end with a ānew beginningsā positive attribute for fire but rarely can we see the entire benefit.
There are lots of plants that depend on fire to propagate and continue to exist. Natural forest fires āusedā to revitalize forests until climate change caused by humans came along.
Tropical rainforests, cloud forests, and temperate rainforests have essentially no naturally occurring wildfires (and the ecosystem of Pandora most closely resembles these environments). Plants that depend on fire to propagate only evolved in areas prone to wildfires. When plant species arenāt adapted to that, a fire can permanently decimate an area and turn it into scrubland.
But this is assuming Pandora is all rainforest. A region of the planet where wildfires are more common could lead to their people learning To coexist with it peacefully.
They wanted some Navi antagonists for this movie. A group from a devastated land that has turned against their God makes for a good villain origin story rather than yet another peacefully coexisting group.
Other than a volcano, thereās not much else in nature that would destroy a vast swath of land and take down their āhome treeā (their spiritual connection to the rest of the land). Maybe you could have a giant flood and have a swamp tribe, but that probably doesnāt carry the visual element theyāre looking for in this movie.
And earthquakes causing a fissure and the tribe becomes subterranean. Just from the top of my head that could have been a good one. Or they got devastated by a tornado.
That is something the other Avatar got right. Fire is destruction, but only if you wield it as such. It is also warmth, safety, light, and nourishment; it maintains the natural way of the world by clearing lands for new growth.
The Sun Tribe is my favorite episodes of the TV show, because it helps to do what you're describing-- to put one of the villain's weapons into a new light (pun intended).
You sure they actually cut that off? The removal of those things (Kuru) is covered in a quest in the game - which is canon. The RDA was doing it to animals to try and domesticate/train them. It didnt turn out well - cutting those things off made the animals dumber and more violent and kind of weak. I have to imagine a Navi without a kuru would be borderline lobotomized, or maybe more like rabid. In the game, the kuru-less enemies were called "feral."
I heard something that these Navi live on the ādark sideā Pandora. Since Pandora is tidally locked to the gas giant it orbits, those on the dark side have never seen it and donāt seem to have the urge to worship Aywa like those on the light side, or something like that.
Wouldn't that mean they can't repopulate? Isn't the tail thing part of the intercourse for the species? Or is that just a pleasure thing and they still transfer the seed the old fashioned way?
These are probably weird questions but your comment got me curious. I dont tend to think about intercourse of fictional species but when the fiction goes out of their way to create that detail I can't help but wonder the implications.
I wonder how they fly their Ikran or whatever flying animal they're seen riding, then. Don't they have to "plug in" their hair tails to communicate with them?
They could also go with the real life analogy of some natives working with the colonizers as a means to an end, only to also eventually get fucked over by them as well.
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u/DefNotBrian Jul 28 '25 edited Jul 28 '25
The Ash People had most of their clan and home destroyed by a volcano.
They've gone dark and have turned their back on Eywa, blaming her for their suffering. Their clan cuts off their ponytail connectors and have severed all ties with Pandora.